A year and a half ago, Amy Tower retired. But ever since the pandemic began, she’s had her hands full, 40 hours a week.
For the past six months, Tower has been sewing and donating masks, full time. Since she started sewing, she’s made 4,000 reusable masks, exponentially surpassing most at-home mask makers.
“I’ve heard of groups of people making as many as I have, but I’ve never heard of any individual making that many,” Tower said.
Unlike a lot of volunteer mask-makers, who didn’t start up until April or May, once the science behind masks became overwhelmingly clear, Tower got an inkling about the need for masks before the virus had fully taken root in the United States.
By the end of February, she was already fully submerged in the project.
Tower said her husband is the reason she started sewing the masks. At his job at the Ace Hardware in Jericho, he had a lot of face-to-face interaction with the public. So once the coronavirus started taking over the news cycle, she figured she should sew him a mask or two.
“He really likes pink flamingos, so the first thing I made had pink flamingos on it,” she said.
Now, months later, Ace Hardware is still the linchpin of her operation. These days, Tower keeps a box inside the store, full of free masks. She said she has to replenish the stash every day — the masks are just that popular.
“They go fast,” Tower said. “My boxes there usually come back virtually empty.”
Tower said she hears from her husband that sometimes, people come inside who aren’t customers at all — they just know about the boxes, and will run inside to grab a mask or two.
There have, however, been a few exceptions to Tower’s hardware store distribution system. The first several batches of masks she sewed, Tower took straight to nursing homes. And lately, Tower said, she’s shifted gears again, including children’s sizes in her lineup, to help with summer camps and school reopenings.
“People ask me to do that kind of thing, so of course I do,” she said.
Tower said she feels lucky, because the whole project has actually been “pretty easy” for her. She said she has the time, and she has a lot of the materials too.
Going into the project, Tower said she had been keeping a huge stash of fabric in her house, waiting for a rainy-day project just like this.
“I’m the kind of person that when I see something, I put it in an I-can-do-something-with-this-later pile,” she said.
It took weeks for Tower to get through all the fabric that was already around the house. Then, she started getting donations of fabric and supplies, some from the hardware store, and others from friends and family who wanted to help out.
“It’s relaxing, it’s fun, and it makes me feel good. I’m not a hero or anything; I just enjoy doing it,” she said.
Tower said she averages about 30 masks a day, and about 1,000 masks a month.
“To make 4,000 masks, to me, is not that big of an investment,” she said. “In the past, I used to make blankets for nursing homes, and those would take a couple of weeks just to make one. Here, I can produce a couple of dozen masks in a day.”
Now, more than half a year into the project, Tower said she has thought, on occasion, about stopping. But she also figures that, as long as the masks keep getting picked up, it’s probably a good idea to keep making them.
Plus, she had already bought fabric with Halloween and Christmas patterns, just waiting to be used.
“At one point, I thought I might stop at 2,000, but that’s obviously way in the rearview mirror,” she said. “It occurs to me that I might stop at 5,000, but maybe not. You know, as long as there’s a need for it, it’s an easy enough thing to do.”
